Juxtapose
by Masako Moonshade
Summary: Sluggy Freelance - After 'Fire and Rain': Zoe didn't recognize the car, but she didn't need to. She recognized the driver. And she knew she was in trouble.


Disclaimer: If I owned Sluggy Freelance or had the creative capacity to do something at this level, do you think I'd be writing fanfics?

Note: This comes from the Chapter entitled "Fire and Rain", at the end of the segment "Hurt", which was posted in early 2002. Yes, I have a good six years to catch up on and consequently all of this will be sinfully inaccurate, but I got a bad case of plot bunnies upon reading the end of this particular arc. And for those of you who have read the comic, you know exactly how dangerous bunnies can be. For any of those who have not read this delightful comic, I send you forth to _www dot __sluggy__ dot com_. By all means, read it—it's amazing, addictive, and punctual. And in reference to the title—my computer thesaurus says that the word means something very different from what my English teacher told me, but it's a cool word, so the title stays.

* * *

**Juxtapose**

* * *

She didn't recognize the car that pulled up in front of her. She didn't expect to: the windshield sticker proclaimed it was a rental. 

But it didn't take long to recognize the driver.

"Get in the car." Zoe wasn't sure why that surprised her. She hadn't exactly been waiting for a friendly greeting, and the words befitted a psychotic murderer well enough to suit their speaker, but they didn't accompany the whoosh of knives, and she wasn't yet running for her life. Granted, she _wanted_ to be. But then, she wanted a lot of things. Like tearing the woman's eyes out of their sockets. Or just giving up then and there and dying where she stood. Or maybe a chance to grab Riff's time machine so she could set this all straight…

"Okay," she said. _Death it is_. Oasis didn't seem to look at her as she opened the door and settled into the passenger seat. She fastened her seat belt, feeling something between irony and spite, and made her move: "Whatever you're planning, I want you to leave my family out of it. And the people from school. None of them did anything to you, and my parents have never even heard of you, so—"

"I won't," Oasis said, her voice unnaturally steady. "This stays between us."

Zoe didn't have anything to say about that. She felt like she'd just signed her death warrant. Sure, she could try to escape, but then Oasis wouldn't have to keep up her end of the deal, and there was no telling who'd get hurt as the hunter closed in on her prey.

That, and Zoe was just plain tired of running.

Unrecognizable Nebraska scenery whirled past the car, uninterrupted by noise, until Zoe's head was throbbing with silence. She grasped for something to talk about—anything—preferably something that would either let her die quickly or else diffuse Oasis' wrath altogether.

"Congrats on the marriage," she said at last. That got the assassin's attention.

"You heard?" she asked sharply. Zoe glanced at her from the corner of her eye and wished she hadn't.

"Gwynn told me. Figured I'd want to know. But don't hurt her or anything either," she added quickly. "That was the last I've heard from her in months—" She wasn't really sure what else to say. Again they collapsed into silence, and if possible this one was more hostile than the last. Outside the scenery melded from brisk country to the something more urban. The car slowed to meet the more conservative speed limits.

This time it was Oasis who broke the silence, and Zoe felt her heart grow colder with every syllable.

"Torg is still in love with you."

She might have been elated, or terrified, or… or something. All that she was aware of was a terrible pain in her chest. If not for the fact that Oasis' hands were both on the steering wheel, she would have guessed that she'd been impaled. She forced herself to look outside, where the car was veering into what looked like a construction site.

"Oh," she managed to croak.

"'Oh'? Is that all you have to say?" The car skidded to a halt, leaving behind tar-black tracks and a cloud of dust. "After… after everything? Just 'Oh'?!?"

_Let it end quick,_ she prayed. And then she let go of reason.

"What do you want me to say?" she demanded. "That I'm happy? That I'm sorry? For what?!" The words were pouring from her mouth now, and with them more than a year's worth of frustration and guilt and agony. "Don't you get it, you psychopath? _You've__ won_. You're the gymnast ninja that everyone falls all over for. You're the one who married Torg. You're the one who can go and pull all those dangerous stunts with him and actually save his butt when it needs saving. You're the one who's smart and pretty and… and…" Those were tears of rage. It had to be rage. "What do you care, anyway? I haven't spoken to the guy since before you got out of the asylum. I haven't even seen him since who-knows-when! Isn't that enough for you?"

Zoe's breath came in ragged gasps, made soggy by tears that shouldn't have been there. Oasis hasn't moved, except to fix her with a stony stare.

"Torg is in love with you," she repeated again. Killing machine or not, Zoe wanted to punch her face in. "He has been all this time. So why did he marry me?"

_Because __he's__ a good person. __Because he felt sorry for you.__Because he wanted to protect me.__ Because __you're__ pretty. __Because he got sick of holding his breath and waiting for me to come around._

"I don't know," she said.

Slowly, deliberately Oasis reached into her coat pocket. Zoe tensed. Was it a gun? A knife? Something worse?

The gymnast pulled out a handful of papers.

"This is my driver's license," she said, displaying the document. "My passport. My plane ticket." Zoe noticed two things immediately: first, that Oasis had the mind-numbing ability to _actually look__ good_ on her driver's license and passport photos. Second, that Oasis' hair had been cut short for the photos and dyed black.

"You only ever call home from your cell phone, and you never really show up except for the holidays anyway," Oasis said. "Just keep making up a bunch of generic bull about classes and they won't even notice."

"Wait," Zoe stammered. "Wait, what are you—"

"By the end of the semester your grades will be good enough to transfer back, and then you can start using your own ID again. Your plane leaves in about an hour. I'll mail your stuff to you later."

"I don't understand. What's—" Zoe made the mistake of looking up from the papers. Oasis' features had tightened, but at last the effort of her remaining expressionless was beginning to show. She was fighting not to cry—a strange act from a practiced killer.

"You're going to take all that," the gymnast said through grated teeth. "And you're going to use it to get to Arizona—that's where Torg and I have been living up until now. Tell them you're me. And when you get there you're going to get a cab to take you to the address on the passport. And then you're going to tell Torg to move back with Riff and Kiki and Bun-Bun and all his other friends."

She stopped to furiously wipe away a few stray tears.

The shock was finally beginning to settle, and the pieces began to fall into place in Zoe's frazzled head: she and Oasis were going to switch places. She was going back.

"I don't understand," she said again. "Why are you doing this?"

For a long time Oasis didn't reply. She just clutched the steering wheel and stared at the dashboard.

"I want him to stop pretending he's not miserable," she said. Her voice was soft and sad, barely audible. "I want him to stop saying he's in love with only me when I know he can't stop thinking about you." She put the car in gear with shaking hands, and pulled out of the construction site. "I just want him to be happy."


End file.
